A court in Sweden has jailed four men behind The Pirate Bay (TPB), the world's most high-profile file-sharing website, in a landmark case. Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were found guilty of breaking copyright law and were sentenced to a year in jail. They were also ordered to pay $4.5m (£3m) in damages. Record companies welcomed the verdict but the men are to appeal and Sunde said they would refuse to pay the fine. Speaking at an online press conference, he described the verdict as "bizarre. "It's serious to actually be found guilty and get jail time. It's really serious. And that's a bit weird," Sunde said. "It's so bizarre that we were convicted at all and it's even more bizarre that we were [convicted] as a team. The court said we were organised. I can't get Gottfrid out of bed in the morning. If you're going to convict us, convict us of disorganised crime. "We can't pay and we wouldn't pay. Even if I had the money I would rather burn everything I owned, and I wouldn't even give them the ashes." The damages were awarded to a number of entertainment companies, including Warner Bros, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI, and Columbia Pictures. However, the total awarded fell short of the $17.5m in damages and interest the firms were seeking. Speaking to the BBC, the chairman of industry body the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) John Kennedy said the verdict sent out a clear message. "These guys weren't making a principled stand, they were out to line their own pockets. There was nothing meritorious about their behaviour, it was reprehensible. "The Pirate Bay did immense harm and the damages awarded doesn't even get close to compensation, but we never claimed it did. "There has been a perception that piracy is OK and that the music industry should just have to accept it. This verdict will change that," he said. The four men denied the charges throughout the trial, saying that because they did not actually host any files, they were not doing anything wrong. A lawyer for Carl Lundstrom, Per Samuelson told journalists he was shocked by the guilty verdict and the severity of the sentence. "That's outrageous, in my point of view. Of course we will appeal," he was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency. "This is the first word, not the last. The last word will be ours." Political issue Rickard Falkvinge, leader of The Pirate Party - which is trying to reform laws around copyright and patents in the digital age - told the BBC that the verdict was "a gross injustice". "This wasn't a criminal trial, it was a political trial. It is just gross beyond description that you can jail four people for providing infrastructure. "There is a lot of anger in Sweden right now. File-sharing is an institution here and while I can't encourage people to break copyright law, I'm not following it and I don't agree with it. "Today's events make file-sharing a hot political issue and we're going to take this to the European Parliament." The Pirate Bay is the world's most high profile file-sharing website and was set up in 2003 by anti-copyright organisation Piratbyran, but for the last five years it has been run by individuals. Millions of files are exchanged using the service every day. No copyright content is hosted on The Pirate Bay's web servers; instead the site hosts "torrent" links to TV, film and music files held on its users' computers. [SOURCE]
wah??! 1 yr jus for loss 10m+ loss of money for companys! lol! you can never steel a pirates treasure! never arrgh...
The site will stay up, there's measures in place to ensure the site stays up even if they go to prison. I think it'll probably be next to impossible to stop pirate bay, if you remove the server it will turn up on a different one, remove the domain a new one will pop up.
There’s a video of one of the guys talking about the verdict here: The Pirate Bay - The world's largest BitTorrent tracker I guess that was made before they officially got the verdict? Edit - just read this on another website: Source
I'm quite interested in what you guys think of this. Should they have been put on trial or allowed to continue with what they do - and why do you think this?
To this question I'm really at a loss. You could say yes since thousands of companies lost millions upon millions or you could possibly say that they WILL make millions upon millions even when TPB is up and why should a copyright be worth more then my human rights?
I think in this case the name “The Pirate Bay” doesn’t really help their cause, but like Google The Pirate Bay can be used for legal purposes as well as illegal purposes. For example Digiex has used The Pirate Bays trackers in the past to track our torrents, nothing illegal just some demos of xbox games and the creative soundcard drivers by Daniel_k if anyone can remember that far back. Why use the pirate bay trackers? Simple there a reliable tracker with almost 100% uptime, just as Google is a reliable search engine. What’s the point in creating a torrent if the tracker will be dead in a weeks time? Both The Pirate Bay and Google find you the information you’re looking for, nether website actually hosts anything illegal. Because of the sites image it’s easy to understand how they got a year in prison, I don’t think they deserve it though. As people have pointed out on other websites, what about Google? yes they don’t advertise you can find copyrighted material on there but its just as easy, if not more easy then searching on The Pirate Bay. Should Google be on trial? It’s never going to happen but it’s an interesting question and you could have a strong argument either way.
this just goes to show how powerful the recording industry is. i doubt they will lose an appeal (if it were in the US), but i'm not very familiar with the Swedish judicial system. =/ it's unfortunate that this can happen, but it happened back in 2000 when DVD's were decoded simply to be able to play DVD's on operating systems other than windows. if i remember correctly, those guys were from a northern European country as well. that led to the passing of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the US, which states that the end user of any piece of entertainment media does not actually own that song/movie/tv show, but has merely purchased a license to use it. the actual physical media means nothing. the CD/DVD/VHS insert with the UPC is the actual license (therefore a copied CD/DVD is illegal). it's disgusting how much power we've given these entertainment industries. i welcome any form of protest that will get anyones attention. if i didnt live so damn far away from Sweden, I'd join up with em too. there are many legitimate reasons for file sharing that surpass pirating. when i was at work, and i wanted to listen to a song that i had at home, i'd just download it. when i find old games who's disc is too scratched to play, or older games that i've purchased and lost track of, i simply download them. a power shift needs to happen, its greed like this that led us to the financial crisis we're now in. our generation will have to deal with information access as a very important issue, it wont be long before we see an end to physical media. how many newspapers are going to be around in five years?
I'm not sure if I understand this, can you explain it in a bit more detail please? InsaneNutter raises some good points in his post, but when people say things like: I think that the key difference that people (choose to?) ignore is that Google was designed to search the web for just about anything (I know that this does cover illegal content, but I'm sure the creators didn't have this in mind as its main purpose when it was made) whereas a website like the Pirate Bay was created specifically for finding illegal content, although there are exceptions as InsaneNutter pointed out. Since the content isn't hosted on the website, I think that this is more about getting to the root of the problem, because if people don't have access to such websites then the problem is virtually gone because most people wouldn't know where to look. A parallel example to this situation would be a drug dealer [Pirate Bay]: do you think that this individual should be arrested for supplying people with the drugs [Torrents] or should the authorities completely ignore this aspect of the chain and go straight to the producers [site where the content is hosted]? I know it might not be worded in the best way possible, but I hope you understand what I'm getting at. To be honest, I don't really understand how the Credit Crunch got started, or works for that matter so if you can explain it in simple terms or point me to a website that can, it would be much appreciated. I really don't think that a few greedy copyright organizations like the RIAA managed to cause the Crunch. I think that there shall be a decrease in demand for CDs and the like but for a very long time, I think that some phyical version will be available. Though I can't find the examples right now, some present day bands still release there music on cassette tapes. Just goes to show that these things do endure for along time, despite being obsolete now. I think that most, if not all, major newspapers will be around in the same way as they are today 5 years down the line. This is because it isnt practical for them to only use a website to report stories, as they wouldn't actually make any money from it, with the exceptions to adverts that people pay to have there. Plus reading something on paper doesn't strain your eyes as much, or at least for me anyway. I'm still undecided about wheter or not they should be punished for what they're doing. I'm just trying to be objective about the situation. Another thing that I didn't ask in my first post, is that do you agree with what has being stated in the quotes posted by InsaneNutter? (Also posted below in case you can't find the bits that I'm talking about) Do you think that what has being said is accurate, exaggerated or blatant lies? Sorry for such a long post but I think that there is a lot to be said on the subject and I'm just trying to get more users to respond, after all this could affect you later down the line.
Not at all, I would say the majority of people search for stuff on Google For example if I Google prison break series 4 episode 17 torrent i get 31,200 results for torrents of that episode, an episode which was only aired around 48 hours ago. Even if the piratebay got taken offline I can still think of many other popular websites, and no im sure many new sites would popup and take its place... just like when supernova got taken down a couple of years ago.